MIAMI.- Doubts arise after the president’s decision was made public this Wednesday, April 24 Joe Biden to enact the recently approved law that seeks to prohibit the use of the Chinese application TikTok in USA.
When will TikTok stop working in the US? Will you be fined if you use it or go to jail for using it? TikTok will not disappear from your phone overnight and its use, once prohibited, will not cause legal problems either.
The law, approved on Tuesday in Congress as part of an aid package for Israel and Ukraine, gives the parent company, ByteDance, based in Beijingto sell the company to US citizens or non-Chinese nationalities.
This period can be extended to an additional three months if the sale of the company is in process, otherwise the application will be banned in the country.
When will TikTok be banned in the US?
After several years of attempts to ban the Chinese social network in the country, including by former president and current Republican candidate Donald Trump, the measure finally obtained the approval of Congress and was signed by President Biden.
Now, the Chinese company, which has been in the crosshairs of US authorities for allegedly being used by China to spy and manipulate to more than 170 million users in the country, it must pass into American hands to continue operating in the country.
The current owners have 270 days (approximately nine months) to find a buyer American to be able to operate in the US, a period that could be extended for an additional 90 days if it is in the process of sale.
Would 360 days in which the application would be working regularly for all its users in the American territory.
What can happen?
It is also possible that it will take years before Americans completely lose access to the social network, because ByteDance filed a lawsuit to block this project that is trying to force the sale of the company.
The company, which alleges that this ban seriously violates the right to freedom of expression, hopes to prevail in the US courts, as it did in 2020, when survived a similar order from former President Trump.
At that time, TikTok challenged the ban and a federal judge temporarily blocked the efforts of the former Republican president, who today opposes this decision, considering that it would benefit Meta, the parent company that owns Instagram and Facebook.
If you do not obtain a judicial guarantee, the deadline to sell TikTok would come to an end in approximately a yearstarting April 24 of this year, if you get the 90-day extension.
That is, by April 2025, the social network would no longer be available in the Apple or Android application stores in the United States.
In addition, users who already have the application on their mobile devices will not be able to perform any more software updates or error repairs, so the application would slowly disappear, in case they do not decide to close it completely.
Source: With information from BBC / AP / AFP / El Cronista
